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WASHINGTON — The national high-school graduation rate has reached a record high of more than 80
percent, but disparities based on students’ racial, socio-economic and disability status remain
alarming, according to an annual report by America’s Promise Alliance, a nonprofit group founded by
former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

An estimated 4 out of 5 public high-school students obtained their diploma in 2012, according to
the report, which used the latest available data from the Department of Education. But figures were
lower for minority students. Seventy-six percent of Latino students and 68 percent of
African-American students graduated, the report found.

“We have to be honest that this is a matter of equity and that we have to change the opportunity
equation,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said yesterday. “All of America’s children are our
children.”

Recent improvements in the nation’s high-school graduation rate — which has risen 8 percent in
six years — have been driven by the closure of so-called dropout factories, typically high-minority
schools that graduate fewer than 60 percent of students. In 2002, such schools enrolled almost half
of all African-American students; by 2012, that number dropped to 23 percent.

The results underscore the need for more federal funding to ensure that all students are
provided with the same opportunities, said Daniel J. Losen, the director of the Center for Civil
Rights Remedies at the University of California-Los Angeles.

“We still have many school districts where it looks like apartheid in America,” he said. “It’s
going to require more than the contributions of the private sector and the competitive grants of
the federal government.”

Several categories of students face persistently lower odds of graduating, including those with
physical and mental disabilities, those from low-income families and those learning English as a
second language.

The nation’s graduation rate began decreasing in the 1990s, but with rising awareness of the
dropout crisis in certain school districts, states and districts began implementing reforms in the
2000s, which are now beginning to bear fruit.

Joanna Hornig Fox, the deputy director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins
University and one of the report’s authors, attributed the improved rates in part to recent federal
education-reform bills, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which implemented
nationwide standards and performance-based funding for public schools.